Secretary of State Marco Rubio's department has quietly built a 31-nation deportation network that has removed 25,000 migrants from the United States, many of them to countries they have never set foot in, using at least $410 million in authorized funds and a small office of roughly 15 staffers.
The operation targets a category of illegal immigrants that previous administrations largely left in place: people whose home countries refuse to accept them, and people shielded by U.S. court orders blocking their return to nations where immigration judges ruled their lives or liberty were at risk. Under federal law permitting deportation to designated "Safe Third Countries," the Trump administration has bypassed both obstacles by sending deportees to willing third nations across Africa, Latin America, the Caribbean, and Central Asia.
Internal government records reviewed by the Washington Post show the administration authorized or pledged at least $410 million to facilitate agreements with those 31 countries as of the end of June. The documents, which the Post described as not previously reported, offer the most comprehensive picture to date of the administration's fast-growing third-country network. Breitbart News reported on the Post's findings and the broader investigation behind them.
The numbers break down into two main channels. Refugees International and Human Rights First estimate that approximately 20,000 people were bussed across the border into Mexico. More than 5,000 others were put on flights to countries in Africa, Latin America, the Caribbean, and Central Asia, nations to which many deportees have no prior connection.
Named destination countries include Ghana, Eswatini, Cameroon, Sierra Leone, and the Dominican Republic. The full list of all 31 nations has not been publicly released.
Deputy Secretary of State Chris Landau, Rubio's top deputy, has conducted the negotiations with foreign governments. Stephen Miller, the president's top migration adviser, has backed those talks. The Department of Homeland Security, led by Markwayne Mullin, carries out the physical removals.
Rubio, whose rising political profile has drawn attention well beyond Foggy Bottom, has not commented publicly on the program in the available reporting.
The operational hub is a unit called the Office of Remigration, housed inside the State Department's Bureau of Population, Refugees and Migration, a bureau historically focused on resettling refugees, not removing them. The office employs approximately 15 people.
The Washington Post noted that the term "remigration" has drawn criticism; the paper reported it "has been popularized by white nationalists in Europe who seek the expulsion of racial minorities and immigrants." The administration has not publicly addressed that characterization.
At least one staffer left the office this year. A former State Department employee described widespread discomfort among colleagues still inside the building.
That former staffer told the Washington Post:
"Everybody feels pretty conflicted. Morale is bad and it's busy, and people do not want to be doing what they're doing. It was a very painful thing."
The same staffer said colleagues shared news links about the deportation program with a trigger warning that reading them would "make you feel awful." For supporters of the policy, that reaction inside the State Department illustrates a deeper problem: a bureaucracy that spent years facilitating mass immigration now balking at the lawful reversal of those policies.
The third-country approach exists because a significant number of nations, Vietnam, Russia, Afghanistan, Ecuador, Iran, Egypt, and China among them, refuse to take back their own citizens. That refusal has long given illegal immigrants from those countries a de facto shield against removal. They could not be sent home because home would not open the door.
Rubio's department, working alongside Miller and DHS, found a workaround grounded in existing federal law. If a migrant's home country will not cooperate, the U.S. can designate a willing third nation as a "Safe Third Country" and send the deportee there instead. The $410 million in authorized funds is the price tag for building that network of willing partners.
Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, defended the approach directly. The Washington Post buried his comments deep in its report, in the 107th paragraph, as Breitbart noted.
"There is no doubt that people are removed to third countries and then end up going back to their own country anyway, and that's because their gambit failed" to remain in the United States.
Krikorian added:
"This is a way to remove people who should be removed. The country of citizenship is responsible for their own citizens. I'm not saying it's a great outcome for folks, but that's the way it is."
His point is straightforward: when a home country refuses to accept its own people, the burden should not fall on American taxpayers to house them indefinitely. The third-country route restores consequences to a system that had effectively eliminated them for migrants from uncooperative nations.
The investigation drew on reporting by Forbidden Stories, a Paris-based nonprofit news organization that coordinated what it called The Deportation Project, a joint investigation by 26 media organizations across 15 countries over six months. The project's journalists interviewed dozens of current and former U.S. government officials, foreign leaders, and immigration attorneys, and spoke to 35 third-country nationals who were deported from the United States.
Rubio has simultaneously navigated other high-profile challenges in the administration, including delicate positioning on Iran nuclear talks that have tested the entire foreign-policy team.
The Guardian, one of the participating outlets, highlighted the case of a 32-year-old Iranian woman identified only as Nika. She had fled Iran 18 months earlier after protesting against the regime. The Guardian reported that she recalled how the handcuffs dug into her wrists during her deportation, and that she begged officers to loosen them, but they did not.
Iran is one of the countries that blocks the return of its own citizens. In some cases, U.S. immigration judges had ruled that deportees' lives or liberty were at risk in their home countries, rulings the third-country framework sidesteps by sending them somewhere else entirely, rather than back to the nation that persecuted them.
Forbidden Stories receives funding from the MacArthur Foundation and the Ford Foundation, both major establishment philanthropies. The Washington Post, which published the most detailed account of the internal government records, is owned by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos. None of those facts invalidate the reported numbers, but they place the investigation squarely within institutions that have historically favored expansive immigration policies.
The legal foundation for the program rests on federal provisions allowing deportation to Safe Third Countries. The precise statute has not been identified in the available reporting, and the specific legal instruments governing each of the 31 agreements, whether treaties, executive agreements, or memoranda of understanding, remain unclear.
Rubio himself has faced personal risks alongside the political ones. A Miami man recently pleaded guilty to threatening to execute the secretary of state on social media, a reminder of the hostility directed at officials enforcing the administration's immigration agenda.
Several questions remain unanswered. The 25,000 figure itself lacks a clear single attribution, it is not specified whether it comes from the Post's reviewed government records, from Refugees International, or from another source. Whether the approximately 20,000 bussed to Mexico and the more than 5,000 flown elsewhere are subsets of that 25,000 total, or separate counts, is also unresolved in the reporting.
What is clear is the scale. A 15-person office, armed with $410 million and 31 cooperative foreign governments, has removed 25,000 people whom the previous system had effectively rendered undeportable. The State Department staffers who shared news articles with trigger warnings may not like it. The countries that refused to take back their own citizens may not like it either.
Rubio's recent public moments have ranged from the serious to the unexpectedly dramatic, but none carry the policy weight of a program that has fundamentally changed how the United States handles migrants no other country wants to claim.
For years, uncooperative foreign governments and sympathetic courts combined to create a class of illegal immigrants who could not be removed. Rubio's State Department found a way. Whether the establishment press frames it as a crisis of conscience or a triumph of enforcement, 25,000 people are no longer in the United States, and that is the point.